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What is the Price of a Human?

 

            
             Money and good healthcare have always gone hand in hand, and unfortunately the patients with the most money usually get the best care. This is why you see so much death and disease in poverty stricken countries. Impoverished people either can't afford the services needed to survive, or the services provided are too primitive and unsanitary to do any good. There are currently great medical advancements continually being made. These advancements are improving the lives of many by improving comfort and lengthening life spans, but along with these advancements comes higher prices for health care. Organ transplantation is one of these new advancements. Since the first organ transplant in 1954 (Smith) the technology in transplantation has risen very rapidly, and so has the need for organs. The shortage of organs had led to a steamy ethical debate on whether or not to legalize the exchange of organs for compensation. Currently in the United States organ sales are illegal but the government is looking into approving the exchange of organs for money in order to raise the number of organs for transplants. Organ sales should not be legalized because compensation for organs will become a higher priority than the health and ethics of the procedure.
             The selling of organs is unethical because it puts a price on human bodies. Patients would just be lowering themselves to the status of supplier for another human by allowing their organs to be bought and sold like everyday commodities. The human body is considered to be sacred. When you start selling parts of the body it loses that value of human identity. Nancy Scheper Hughes illustrates this as the slippery slope. This starts when a person looks at another and realizes that inside that other person's body is something that can prolong his or her life. It comes to the point where people say "I want that; I need that, even more than you do." With the same idea Scheper also states that, "It is not fair that poor people should feel pressured to sell their organs to wealthy strangers who think of them as nothing more than reservoirs of spare parts.


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